While flipping through channels on the TV, do you ever stop and watch, at least for a little while, those reality shows about hunting ghosts or big foot? If yes, then you have a good idea for the basis of this book series- Monster Hunters. This series is not an adrenalin racing, keep you away with nightmares at night, creepy story. It is for those readers who are not sure if cryptids exist or not, but are curious about them all the same.

Cool added feature, there is a little grey goat man at the bottom of each page that appears to ‘walk’ when the reader flips the pages.

Ben and his young helpers film an Internet Show- Discover Cryptids. “In each episode, they focused on a specific creature from myth or legend that may exist.” (4) This time it is The Pope Lick Monster aka Goat Man, near Louisville, Kentucky. Ben is there to interview a man, Chester, who puts on a yearly Halloween attraction featuring Goat Man. At the end of the interview they ask Chester to see the Goat Man costume. As it turns out, the mask is missing for some unknown reason.

Ben’s group then goes to video tape footage around the train trestle where Goat Man is known to have been seen. There they bump into a local police officer who patrols the area to kept curious sightseers away. Later, at the diner in town, the officer tells of his own personal encounter with Goat Man.

When Ben and his team go back to the trestle after dark, a teenage girl comes running down the trail screaming that she’s just seen the monster. The team splits up. One goes back to their van with the girl and the others run in the direction of the monster. The only thing they find is the missing mask. Ben and the team take the girl home. Then, they return the mask to Chester. While there Chester’s mother confesses she took the mask to prove to Chester that she can be scary, so he’ll give her a bigger part in the annual Halloween attraction.

Later, back at the hotel, as the “Discover Cryptids” team goes over the film footage, one of them points out a shadowy something clinging to the trestle. Goat Man, maybe? ” ‘Whatever it is,” he said. It’s so cool.’ “

One mistake I found in proofreading, on page 24, the character Jake was mistakenly called Jack twice, then goes back to Jake.

Brian P. Cleary once again is explaining things to young people in a way they will understand and better yet, will enjoy! This time Brian’s topic in his CATegorical series is dealing with computer coding.

Brian lets his readers know coding deals with commands in a special language, loops are repeated coded instructions, and conditionals are sets of rules dealing with “If this … then that will happen”.

“Loops and conditionals lend a big hand to code-writing pros of all ages, like YOU to write software, create fun, new games, or make your own apps or web pages!” (20-21)

Martin Goneau’s illustrations of cats personified learning about computers and coding make this a every fun and kid friendly visual learning experience. Brian P. Cleary and Martin Goneau make a great pair!

As an adult, I like page 22, the afterward, almost as much as the entire rest of the book put together. I hope students will not skip this page.

This book is part of the Symbols of American Freedom series. It states the Washington Monument was built to honor George Washington. At the time it was built in 1884, it was the tallest building in the world, at 555 feet.. The text is more about George Washington than it is about the actual monument.

There are one or two sentences on each left hand page opposite the full page picture on the right page.

It ends with www.factsurfer.com for more information.

It’s okay, but it doesn’t really live up to its title. It’s like it’s trying to spin something into more of a story than it really is. It starts out telling the story that townspeople like to share, which brings tourists to this small Alaskan town, but just a few pages in it tell us that all of that is just a legend, and that the town is really too small to have a formal government. The whole second half of the book is just telling the story of the life of a small town cat. In the end, it left me wondering what the point of it all was.